Adding & Editing Video Captions for your Facebook Videos

You’re publishing videos on Facebook – hooray! Video is currently all the rage, and Facebook Live as well as direct-uploaded video files are favorites in the Facebook algorithm.

What I’m about to write may seem counterintuitive given the popularity of live video…but…there are a lot of people who will see (and watch) your video without sound.

Seems crazy, right?

If you give it some thought, it’s actually not that weird. Video is favored in the News Feed, so it has a higher likelihood to show up in your feed. Think about all the times, as you move through your day, that you check Facebook. There are probably a good number of those times that you’re glad the sound is off because video playing over your phone or at your computer at work would not be ideal.

If you’re curious to find out what percentage of the videos views you earn have the sound on or off when viewed, there’s a way to look. Visit any of your video posts and click on the number of people reached that shows up beneath the video. From there click on Video Views, and then scroll down a bit to the Sound On/Sound Off section.

So if you’re making and posting videos to your Facebook Page, which is fantastic, you can take full advantage of those videos and all the views you get by adding captions to your videos.

How to Add Captions to your Facebook Videos

The process of adding captions to your Facebook videos is a bit different if/when you run an ad in the way that if you create a new video for the purposes of an ad, you can have Facebook generate captions for that video once you upload it to your Ads Manager (meaning, a video doesn’t have to be published on your Page first to add captions). But for the most part, these instructions that I’ve included below will be the ones you’ll use to add captions to your Facebook videos, regardless of whether you post that video on your Page or upload it to your Ads Manager for an ad.

Facebook captions are free to add. You can have Facebook generate captions for a video you directly uploaded to your Page or for any Facebook Lives that you do. The videos do need to finish processing (either after uploading or once you finish your Lives) before the captions functionality becomes available.

Visit your Page, click on Publishing Tools located in the white Admin navigation bar (or by typing in https://www.facebook.com/YourPageName/publishing_tools/), and then click on Video Library in the left sidebar.

Hover your mouse to the right of the title of the video you want to add or edit captions for. Click on the pencil icon that says “Edit Video”.

In this Edit Video view, you can change the post text that you originally gave your video when you created it (if Live) or uploaded it, change or give your video a title, add tags to your video (which makes it more discoverable), choose or upload a thumbnail for your video, and add or edit the captions of your video.

Click on the Captions tab to either upload an .srt file of captions you’ve already prepared or click to have Facebook generate captions for you.

Once Facebook has finished generating captions for your video, it will give you the option to review and edit them. Expect that there will be a fair amount of editing to do. You can start and stop the video manually, and Facebook will stop the video for you when you start to type in one of the caption fields.

Once you have edited your video captions to your liking, click the blue Save to Video button and you’re all set!

As soon as you’ve clicked on Save to Video, your video will now play for viewers with captions included. If you find a mistake in your captions that you need to fix, follow these steps to make that correction and resave them to your video.

Liz is a marketer, social media & online marketing consultant, speaker and mom. Originally from Chicago and currently living in the land of Dixie, she relishes in the flavor of fried pickles and BBQ, but longs for deep dish and a proper Chicago dog.

Thanks for the article. I uploaded my first video a few hours ago, but I don’t see the option to generate the captions? How long after uploading does it generally take to show up? I’ve gone back to the “edit” selection several times, but only see the “upload SRT File” option. Is the auto generate captions choice available to everyone with a Facebook business page?

Is the video published on the Page, scheduled for future publishing, or in draft? I had this same issue pop up with a client just yesterday. It seems like there’s some quirkiness happening with Facebook right now. For her, it took moving the video out of Draft and scheduling it for future publishing before she got the Captions button in addition to the SRT button. Then when she did that, she was able to get the captions to generate, but Facebook removed the auto-captions for the first 45 seconds of her video. She ultimately deleted that video and reuploaded. This is unusual and not how things typically work. Hopefully Facebook resolves itself soon.

Hi, thanks for the reply. My video posts are published (I’ve done 2 so far). They aren’t in draft or scheduled mode. After I published my first video post, I did later take it down and re-publish, but to no avail. Nothing I do seems to bring in the “generate” captions button. Since my Facebook page is only a few days old, I wasn’t sure if that was the issue. Or, if there needed to be a certain number of likes (I have around 35). At any rate, I hope the issue resolves and I’m able to access that option. I know it’s not perfect, and it requires re-typing, but it’s a handy feature to have. Not to mention that many people scroll on their mobile devices with the sound off and look at the captions (which is why I want to add them to my videos). If you have any other thoughts or suggestions, please let me know!

HI thank you for your article – I’ve managed to add captions to my FB video using this method that you have shown, and they show up fine on a desktop, but not on mobile – do you have any suggestions as to why this may be?
Thanks in advance 🙂

Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough! I didn’t mean to wait a few hours after publishing the video, but rather that I try to come back later when I get that captions error. There’s really nothing to do but keep trying. I’ve even had it where I was working my way through editing the captions that were already applied to the video, and saving as I went. I could get it to save and update the first couple times, and then started getting that same caption error.